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INTERVIEW WITH WARREN PARKER
BY GEORGE GENTRY NOVEMBER 2, 2000
MR. PARKER: My name is Warren T. Parker. I served with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service for thirty-two years. I came to Ashville, North Carolina in 1977 as the
Endangered Species Coordinator in the old area office, back when we had area offices.
The area offices folded up in the early 1980s. We moved through another reorganization
and I was left as the Field Supervisor of an Endangered Species Field Office in Ashville. I
recruited personnel for the office and I served as Field Supervisor from roughly 1981
through late 1984. I then became the Red Wolf Coordinator for the U. S. Fish and
Wildlife Service. As the Red Wolf Coordinator I actually inherited a lot of work from
Curtis Carley who had been the Fish and Wildlife Service Red Wolf Specialist for many
years, but in Region 2. Since Region 4 suddenly became directly involved in the Red Wolf
Recovery program Region 4 insisted that he bow out of the project, or else move to
Region 4, which he wouldn’t do. I became the Red Wolf Coordinator. If I am not
mistaken, the Red Wolf Coordinator may have been one of the first Endangered Species
Coordinators.
MR. GENTRY: It was the first. So you were actually the second person to take over
the recovery of that endangered species.
MR. PARKER: The recovery, that’s correct. One of the first things that I did was to
appoint a Recovery Team. My knowledge of Wolves was sparse. The reason for my
being appointed as the Endangered Species Coordinator was because of the location of the
reintroduction sites. I had worked for two years with Curt Carley at Land Between the
Lakes over in western Tennessee and Kentucky on a proposed reintroduction project in
conjunction with TVA. Because as Field Supervisor, my responsibility included
Kentucky and Tennessee, North and South Carolina and all endangered species activities
in those four states. I was almost mandated to become directly involved in that project of
the national significance of the reintroduction of an “extinct in the wild” species. I spent a
great deal of time in the Land Between the Lakes area for two years with Curt on that
project. The main failure of that project was that we did not have an experimental
nonessential designation for endangered animals at that time. It was being proposed at
that time, but we did not have anything officially on the books in 1982-83. There was
nothing there to give us the legal authority to reintroduce an endangered animal that was
not fully protected by the Endangered Species Act. The local people over there and the
deer hunters were afraid that the Wolves were going to kill all of the deer and then
possibly even shut down deer hunting in the Lake Between the Lakes area. Then the
environmentalists thought that we were not going to provide them enough protection.
The project started failing and we saw that it wasn’t going to make it. We held five or six
public meetings and they enlisted a tremendous amount of local interest. There was a lot
of opposition and a lot of support. But the reality of the project was unless you had
good public support you were really kind of spinning your wheels.
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MR. GENTRY: Was that a lesson that you think that your group took to heart?
MR. PARKER: Absolutely.
MR. GENTRY: What then was the thing that you learned from the Land Between the
Lakes experience?
MR. PARKER: You have to be honest with the local people. You can’t pull the wool
over them and be a politician. You have to tell them straight up in the best of your
opinion and to the best of your knowledge what is going to happen. And you can’t pull
any punches. You’ve got to gain the confidence of the local people. That is a hard task;
to walk into an area where a predatory animal has been gone for a hundred years and say
“we want to put these animals back where they were”. And then try to explain why this
is in their best interest.
MR. GENTRY: They don’t always see it that way.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. They really don’t understand that. Another key problem,
the one that I failed to anticipate was the fact that the Land Between the Lakes National
Recreation Area was designated when Johnson was President. Through condemnation,
lands were taken from local people. There was a great deal of animosity towards TVA
over there. All of a sudden the Fish and Wildlife Service and TVA were in bed together.
A lot of local people who had lost properties to the Federal government for the National
Recreation Area came to the public meetings and blasted the Fish and Wildlife Service
along with TVA. It gave them a podium to blast the project as well as the whole idea of
the Federal government being involved in that area. This really hurt the whole project.
MR. GENTRY: Did you start the St. Vincent’s Island project?
MR. PARKER: Yes.
MR. GENTRY: Tell me about that. What was the purpose there?
MR. PARKER: One of the problems in dealing with the Red Wolf was that we had a
captive breeding project out at Graham, Washington. And there were half a dozen or less
Zoos around the country that had captive animals in pens. These were second and third
and fourth generation captive animals that had never been in the wild. I came up with the
idea of using Fish and Wildlife Service islands in the southeast, and releasing captive
animals on those islands. This would allow them to breed and bring offspring on those
islands, which should theoretically be wild animals, which would be wild stock to utilize
in a reintroduction project. I think this proved to be a very valuable concept. I think that
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a lot of the success of the Alligator River project has come about because of using animals
that were born in the wild, instead of captive animals that had never been in the wild.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to the public meetings. Was dealing with the public the
most difficult part of the recovery?
MR. PARKER: Oh yes, absolutely. Dealing with the public is the absolute key. If you
can gain the confidence again, and be completely honest and straightforward with the
public, you are miles ahead.
MR. GENTRY: You have had other, vast experiences with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Does that same message or way of operating carry over into all of the other things that we
do?
MR. PARKER: I think it does. In any aspect of recourse management, the public has to
be made aware of what the situation is. And then you try and get them involved in the
project in any way that you can come up with. It is all in the public interest, and in the
interest of the resource to get the public involved at any level you can, at any level you
can either volunteer, or whatever. The main thing up front is to make sure that you tell
them the truth.
MR. GENTRY: From what I have heard of the history of the Service, and the way the
Refuges have been in the past, that was a hard lesson to learn.
MR. PARKER: Really! That is correct.
MR. GENTRY: Can you talk about that, about way back when, and you’re seeing it
change?
MR. PARKER: That’s been true over the years on all of the Federal projects. I worked
on Savannah National Refuge, which was my first job with the Fish and Wildlife Service
back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That problem was even there at Savannah.
Although Savannah provided a lot of income for local hardware stores, and places around
like that but the very fact that a lot of that Federal property had been taken away and
was now in Federal ownership was a problem. It was now up to the Refuge Manager to
permit trapping or public hunting or whatever on the Refuge. I think that this was a sore
spot with the local people. Therefore, you had to go out of your way as a Manager to
make sure that you continued to help the public in their quest for resources as far as fur
harvest or hunting, fishing or whatever it might be, even gathering medicinal plants. If it’s
feasible to let the public participate and be involved on the Refuge, I think that’s a key to
the success of any Refuge effort. I know that it is true in the event of trying to
reintroduce an endangered species that has been gone for many, many years. If you can’t
gain that confidence, then you are going to have a tough time of it.
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MR. GENTRY: How do you feel about the Red Wolf program there? Are you keeping
up with?
MR. PARKER: I keep up with it through Gary Henry. Gary is now retired, so I won’t
have any real source of information. But the project in eastern North Carolina has gone
very well. I would like to go back in a moment and go through some of the historical
facets about the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge project. The project in the
Smokeys, which I initiated in 1989 failed because of several reasons. One was that the
Park really didn’t have the prey base, except in Cave’s Cove where we reintroduced
animals into the area. We had animals leaving the Park and we found that it was difficult
to keep the animals in the Park, primarily because of the prey base. The prey base just
isn’t that good in the Park because it is all old growth. Therefore, the small mammal base
isn’t there for the Wolf to prey on. That project, when I was in charge of the program
was set up as a two-year experiment to see if the project could succeed. But it was also
to see what the interactions between the Coyote, which was then expanding not only into
the Park but also into eastern North Carolina. We wanted to see if it was possible to
reintroduce Wolves into an area where you already have resident Coyotes. That was the
original thesis for the project. It was a two-year project, but then I retired in 1990 and
the project was kept on track for another three or four years. I think that I might have
pulled the plug a little earlier. But nevertheless, a great deal of knowledge and information
was gained from the project in the Smokey Mountain National Park.
The project at Alligator River is relatively secure. I think that there will be Red Wolves in
that area for many, many years. The only thing that I regret is that we didn’t try another
reintroduction site somewhere in the intervening years. Where that would have been, I am
not sure. I probably would have attempted one on the Francis Marion National Forest,
which is near Bull’s Island. We had great public support there in that area north of
Charleston. On the Bull’s Island project, I think the Forest Service would have worked
with us. But again, the problem with the Red Wolf is the expansion of the Coyote into
its former range. With the demise of the Wolf, the Coyote has moved east.
MR. GENTRY: You said you wanted to talk about some historical things in the Red
Wolf project. Let’s go back and go over those.
MR. PARKER: In 1984 the Prudential Insurance Company offered to give the property
that is now known as the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to the Federal
government for a tax write-off. As I understand, going back those many years ago to the
mid 1980s, Prudential was financially strapped and having a difficult time with that
property down there. They were having a difficult time in managing that property in
mainland Dare County for farming. They decided to take the tax write-off and donate the
one hundred and eighty thousand acres or so to the Federal government. The Fish and
Wildlife Service secured the land through that arrangement. Immediately I saw that this
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land down there, which is a peninsula, might be an ideal site for a Red Wolf reintroduction
because there was water on three sides. It was a fairly sizeable piece of property with
adjacent properties that might be made available for expansion onto private lands. The
new Refuge Manager down there was John Taylor. He and I became close friends. John
came down from Alaska where he had initiated a new Wildlife Refuge. He was very much
interested in Wolves. John became my right hand man; he and I really worked together
for about a year trying to secure the interest and support of local people in the Dare
County area and in surrounding areas. We wound up hosting four public meetings down
there and after a year of working with the people there, we ended up getting about eighty
or ninety percent support from the local people. I thought that this was extraordinary.
The Red Wolf had been gone from eastern North Carolina for about two hundred years.
So this was novel, and it was really different. But I think that the public realized the
plight of the Red Wolf and I give those people a lot of credit, I’ll have to say; they were
really willing to work with us and that made it more important to John and I to give them
the straight facts as we knew them. There were some things that we told those people
that didn’t turn out the way that we thought they would. One of the major ones that I
still have nightmares about was the recapture collar. Dave Meach and I had worked
together some in northern Minnesota in an effort to learn about Wolves and capture
techniques. Dave is the acknowledged Wolf specialist in the world probably. Dave and I
became good friends. Dave was interested in developing a recapture collar, which was a
collar that you fitted around the neck of an animal. You could, through darts implanted in
the collar, tranquilize the animal by remote radio signal. You could then go and pick the
animal up. This was a tremendous reintroduction ploy. The local public thought that
this sounded great. If you can put collar on these animals and “If they end up in my back
yard you can knock then down and go pick them up”. It was great PR. Dave and I went
to 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, and some how or another those people decided that this
idea had some merit. They agreed to develop the recapture collar for us. After the
support of the local people, and including this concept of the recapture collar to which I
attribute gaining their support, the animals actually got to the Alligator National Wildlife
Refuge, and we put the animals out in the wild after acclimation, we found that the
recapture collars were failing. They were not working. Some of the collars worked, and
some didn’t. There were a lot of gold connections in the collar technology, as I
understand it. The salt-water environment down there in mainland Dare County was just
too harsh. It caused corrosion in some of the internal components.
MR. GENTRY: So they failed. And to the locals, you were a liar probably.
MR. PARKER: That is right. However, we talked to a lot of people. We started to hold
a public meeting and explain the problem but we talked to some local people and they
kind of understood. Again, that was three or four months into the project, and given that
three or four month period of time, the Wolves had not created a problem with anybody.
I think that kind of took the edge off of the potential for public problems. There was a
chicken lost every now and then. There were some other problems that came up but
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these were mainly law enforcement type problems. One of the things that I told the
people was that under this experimental, nonessential designation of these animals; if a
hunter for example, happened to shot a deer and the bullet went through the deer and
killed a Wolf we wouldn’t prosecute. This was a hypothetical example that I gave them.
And of course there was no intent involved. Then we had a case down there in which one
of the gentlemen that I had talked to, and who was supporting the project; he was a
trapper on the Refuge, caught a Red Wolf in one of his sets and the Wolf drowned. His
intent, I am sure was not to catch a Red Wolf, but the way that he had set his traps had
violated State Fish and Game Commission law. Our law enforcement people decided that
they wanted to get involved too and that became an issue and a little bit of a problem.
From the biological perspective, and I can only speak from that end of it since I am not a
Law Enforcement Agent, we did everything that we could to isolate the public from any
actual involvement in killing a Wolf. A Wolf hit by a car at night is something that we
would not prosecute. That was the attitude that we took. And that attitude held good
the whole time that I was involved in the project, and I think that continues today. There
has been some “blips” here and there with the project; local landowners shoot one,
thinking that it is a Coyote, and all of a sudden they are being prosecuted by the Federal
government. That’s happened, and it has caused some real hard feelings. But by and
large the idea that John Taylor and I presented to the people down there; we maintained
that continuity of thought and intent. There was never any intent to do anything except
for what we did. But I am getting ahead of myself; after five years, we did go back and
hold public meetings down there. After the Wolves were released, there was a five-year
interim. We evaluated the project and went back and held public meetings and the public
was, by and large, was still ninety percent in favor of the project because there had been
no interactions or problems. Nobody had been attacked by a Wolf. Again, I think that
the project was successful. The only problem down there now is the potential for inter-breeding
with Coyotes.
MR. GENTRY: That is still a problem?
MR. PARKER: It is still a problem, and will probably always be a peripheral problem.
The concept, as Curt Carley explained to me, and I accepted, is that you can maintain a
core base of pure Red Wolves, but on the perimeter you are going to have some inter-breeding.
Which now, they are finding is true even up in Canada with the Grey Wolves in
Ontario and in northern Minnesota. Those animals’ genetic makeup has been tainted by
Coyote genetics. If you talk about pure Grey Wolves, you have to be careful about
where you are talking about.
MR. GENTRY: Pure anything!
MR. PARKER: That’s right! [Laughing]
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MR. GENTRY: The life expectancy of any Endangered Species Coordinator is pretty
precarious isn’t it?
MR. PARKER: Oh yeah! Well, I was fortunate, because I had timed my retirement well.
I had planned my retirement, and when I hit thirty-two years, I decided to retire. In a
way, I am glad that I did, and in a way, I wish I had stayed another two or three years. I
really enjoyed it. I thought that that was one of the best jobs in the Fish and Wildlife
Service. The Park Superintendent in the Great Smokeys, and I’m not trying to blow my
own horn, but he really hated to see me retire. But Gary Henry, who I had hired, was
with the Forest Service and he came down and worked with me and I wanted Gary to take
my place because I trusted him. I knew that he was a top biologist and I knew that he
could handle the job easily, and he did. Gary did a fine job with it. But yes, a
Coordinators job is one where if you are successful, you have worked yourself out of a
job.
MR. GENTRY: And if you’re not?
MR. PARKER: And if you’re not [successful] you’re in the frying pan with the Fish
and Wildlife Service! I still think that the Coordinators have sort of fallen by the
wayside. They don’t seem to be the key that they used to be. The Coordinator, to me, is
the guy that the Fish and Wildlife Service should depend on. You don’t give a job to a
Coordinator unless he’s the guy that’s going to do the job. Then you turn loose, you
don’t put constraints on him, and you let him go. Let him run his budget, and he gets the
job done. Fortunately for me, my Supervisor was in Atlanta, in the Regional office there.
And he gave me carte blanche and let me do what I wanted to do and what I had to do. In
my opinion, that’s the way that the Coordinator job can be best handled. Trust the guy,
pay him the salary and let him loose, and he’ll do the job. I have every confidence in the
Fish and Wildlife Services professional staff.
MR. GENTRY: We were talking about some of the public problems with the Red Wolf
and other endangered species; what about biological problems that you had with the Red
Wolf?
MR. PARKER: There were biological problems. I am sure that Curt Carley has told you
about these. The remnant animals that we had to deal with were numbered in the
fourteen, fifteen, sixteen realm. That was the genetic pool from which we had to work
which was always a concern. There was always a fear of inter-breeding, genetic
bottlenecks, so that was always in back of our minds. In the project out at Graham,
Washington, Sue Burns took care of the Wolves. Sue was very careful in separating these
animals, genetically, as far as she could. The gene pool to start with was very small, but
you try to expand that as much as you can, and that was a problem. Looking back at the
Land Between the Lakes and the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge projects,
actually the Wolves themselves were not difficult to deal with biologically. It was easy to
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trap a Wolf, but it is hard to catch a Coyote. Mike Phillips came down; John Taylor and
I hired Mike Phillips. Mike was in Alaska at the time and he came down and took over
the Field Project at Alligator River. Mike did a splendid job. And that was a day and
nighttime job. You had to be all the time, and he did a great job. But again, the Wolves
were not that hard to deal with. If you had to catch a rogue Wolf, he wasn’t all that hard
to catch. But now the Coyote moving in has proven to be another problem. They are
much more difficult to capture and control. On the periphery of the core population of
Wolves, there is inter-breeding going on. That is one thing that we found out. The
problem with the Red Wolf of course is having big enough areas in which to reintroduce
these animals. I am afraid the clock is just moving against the Red Wolf as far as having
other areas in which to reintroduce them. I mentioned other reintroduction areas, but
today there are probably no other areas in the southeast to release the Red Wolf because
there are Coyote populations established everywhere. One of the things that I was
concerned about with the Mexican Wolf project out in Arizona, was the fact that the
Mexican Wolf had been gone from the lower forty-eight for many years. There were still
a few animals left in old Mexico, but in the interim the Coyote population had filled that
void where the Wolves were at one time. I feel that they are going to be phased in with
their reintroduction program, with the same problem of putting animals back into a sea of
Coyotes and hoping that they can maintain themselves genetically.
MR. GENTRY: Is there anything else about Red Wolves that we need to hit on before I
ask you just some general questions about the Service?
MR. PARKER: As I look back over the Red Wolf projects, back into the 1970s; I
remember when I first went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, one of my first jobs
was in Texas and Oklahoma on the Red River over there. I would meet State and Federal
Animal Control Specialists who were trapping what now I know were Red Wolves,
because of the predator-livestock problems. I have often wondered, and I wish that I had
had the foresight to get involved with those trappers who were catching these animals.
First of all, I wish that I had kept the animals, pelts and everything, because they just
destroyed them. I would like to have found out, really, how much livestock damage was
going on, or was this just something that was kept in place, and kept going on and on. It
had become a perpetual motion machine almost, of trapping predators.
MR. GENTRY: So you saw a time when the Federal government was either at the same
time, or making a transition of killing the Red Wolf?
MR. PARKER: Oh yeah, in north Texas in the Sulfur River Bottoms, and in the northern
Red River area there was active participation by the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as
the States of Oklahoma and Texas in trapping these animals.
MR. GENTRY: And at the same time you were working for them?
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MR. PARKER: No, this was back in the early 1960s.
MR. GENTRY: So, not then years after that, you were trying to save them?
MR. PARKER: That’s correct. I worked in Vicksburg, Mississippi for a few years and I
remember a Canadian biologist, he was Dave Meacher’s mentor, and I can’t remember his
name, but he was down south of Vicksburg on one of the islands in the river, trapping
Wolves, and they were Red Wolves. He was trying to document the status of the Red
Wolf. And this was a Canadian biologist now, who is now dead. But he was one of Dave
Meacher’s mentors. I wish I could come up with his name. I do remember that; there
was active interest in the Red Wolf, even at that time. All of that was coming to a head
when Curt Carley got involved with the demise of the Red Wolf, and the Fish and
Wildlife Service was involved in the demise! So, what comes around goes around! A few
years later we are pumping Fish and Wildlife Service money into trying to get the Wolf
back into the wild. It is kind of an interesting scenario if you get to thinking about it.
MR. GENTRY: We hopefully learn from our mistakes.
MR. PARKER: That was in the old days. Predators were looked on with great disfavor.
Cougars and Wolves and Eagles, anything that preyed on game animals was looked on
with great disfavor.
MR. GENTRY: I take it that you are saying that it wasn’t necessarily the “good old
days”?
MR. PARKER: That’s right! People think about it, but it wasn’t! Our biology was
really skewed.
MR. GENTRY: How much progress do you think that we have made?
MR. PARKER: Oh, enormous progress. The Endangered Species Act was the greatest
piece of wildlife legislation ever signed into law. It changed the Fish and Wildlife Service
from a bunch of waterfowl biologists essentially, or game biologists, into real biologists,
with a full perspective of what’s going on out there. Because when the law was signed in,
in 1973 there was not a cadre of people in the Fish and Wildlife Service to take over this
magnificent piece of legislation, nobody. I remember that Keith Schriner was the first to
be in charge of the Endangered Species program in Washington. He had to go out to the
Universities to recruit people who were specialists. Nobody hardly in the Fish and
Wildlife Service was knowledgeable about endangered species.
MR. GENTY: I guess you must have left the Service just before the Ecosystem
Management came in. Are you familiar with that?
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MR. PARKER: Basically, yes.
MR. GENTRY: Do you see that as another step in the right direction?
MR. PARKER: Yeah.
MR. GENTRY: Tell me about that.
MR. PARKER: Managing the ecosystem is important. I worked in Vicksburg in what
they used to call River Basins. That was almost an ecosystem concept, but not as
expanded as it is today. We were looking at river basins, the whole river basin. We were
surveying the Red River, and the White River in Arkansas for example. Also the
Hatchaphalia [sic] or whatever river it is, a basin. The Service was sort of forced into it at
the time by the Army Corps of Engineers because they wanted to develop those River
Bottoms, so the Service became involved in a roundabout way. It was not because
somebody had the bright idea that we ought to be doing this, but because of a reaction to
the Army Corps of Engineers and their Water Resource projects. In a miniscule way, we
were involved in an almost ecosystem approach at that time. But non-game was not
considered. It was strictly from a game resource perspective, and a Fisheries resource
perspective that was based on the krill census. So today we have expanded from that into
the whole kit and caboodle. But again, I think that the Endangered Species Act is what
stimulated this whole idea. Over the years a cadre of Fish and Wildlife Service
employees, of which I was one, became involved in the Endangered Species Act and then
our perspective changed. The whole concept of “Game Management” which were taught
in school, changed to “Wildlife Management”, all wildlife. Then of course you get
involved in the ecosystem concept. So it is a natural evolution, but the Endangered
Species Act, in 1973, was the sparkplug that started this whole process, in my opinion.
MR. GENTRY: O.K. What other major changes have you seen in the Service over your
thirty-two year career?
MR. PARKER: The one thing that I talk about with a lot of my cronies, and I don’t
mean to “knock” the Service: let me say first that I love the Fish and Wildlife Service, but
unfortunately people are coming into the Service today who are not hunters and are not
fishermen. Their perspective about hunting and fishing is not what it was before. I am
shooting from the hip now, and I hope that I am wrong. I have a feeling, and a lot of my
state compatriots say the same thing. The Wildlife Commission here in North Carolina is
hiring people that are not hunting or fishing. Therefore, their concept is more protective.
Which I, as an old-schooler have a problem with. I view our resources out there as
renewable resources. Hunting is part of that, legitimately. The Pittman-Robinson
Program, which I was involved with for about ten years, has done so much good for
wildlife management in the United States through PR [Pittman-Robinson] and “DJ”
monies to the States. Really, a lot of the land that was purchased with PR monies not
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only was preserving deer and waterfowl and other games species, but enormous amounts
of non-game species at the same time. In a way, the ecosystem approach was being
practiced, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t realize it.
MR. GENTRY: When you, in your earliest days in the Service, maybe before you were
in the Service: as I understand the history of wildlife in the part of the country where I
come from: did you find that there were virtually no deer left?
MR. PARKER: That’s right, the deer were gone.
MR. GENTRY: Give me a little perspective about that, of what change that you have
seen.
MR. PARKER: Well, when I was a youngster, there were no deer in Virginia and
northeastern North Carolina. I went to NC State. There were no deer. There were a few
remnant native, original eastern wild turkeys in the River bottoms. I used to hunt those.
But squirrel hunting was the thing. If you really wanted to be adventurous you went
turkey hunting. But there were no deer. Again, squirrel hunting was the entry for people
that wanted to hunt.
MR. GENTRY: This was because there were no deer.
MR. PARKER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: When did you start to see it change? And how and what made it
change?
MR. PARKER: Again, I have to go back to the Pittman-Robinson program. The monies
that went to the States from the tax on firearms and ammunition generated the World War
II veterans that came out of wildlife schools. I am a Korean War veteran, and I worked
with a lot of these guys. But the World War II guys were the “old” guys to me.
[Laughing] Now I am an old guy! These are the guys that I worked with, and my mentors
were the World War II vets who came back and became Wildlife Managers. With the help
of the Pittman-Robinson program, these guys took the money and started restocking deer.
They were taking deer out of Wisconsin, or wherever they could get deer. That program
became one of the biggest success stories in the Pittman-Robinson program; the
reintroduction of the Whitetail Deer. Again, I go back and think of many of these guys
from World War II. I mean these guys drank, and fought, they would get in fistfights. I
was overawed with these guys all of the time because they were “rough and ready”
people! At night you played poker, all night even if you didn’t want to! It was different
world, back in the 1960s, because that was it. These were all World War II vets and they
were hard lifers. I got sucked in with these guys. I admired them a great deal, but after a
week with them, I was ready to go home! But I will give them the credit!
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MR. GENTRY: It sounds almost like Whitetail Deer was an endangered species without
us ever recognizing it.
MR. PARKER: That’s correct. But the reintroduction of these animals, you see, those
were the reintroductions that started this whole concept of reintroductions. It all started
with bringing the Whitetail Deer back. The Wisconsin deer are still talked about around
here, on the Biltmore estate here in western North Carolina. These were Wisconsin
“blue” deer. They called the blue deer because they are dark colored deer. You still hear
people around here in the mountains say that they have seen a blue deer every now and
then. These are remnants of that genetic pool of Wisconsin animals. I’ll have to say that
the Pittman-Robinson program and the World War II vets who went to Wildlife School
are responsible, in my opinion, for what you see today in the deer population and the
turkey population in the southeast. The Wild Turkey became a prime reintroduction
candidate, and it has been nothing but a big success story. I have helped guys in
Kentucky release turkeys, and I have helped them release deer. One of my treasured
memories of the Pittman-Robinson program was working with those State biologists.
Those guys knew what they were doing. And they were dedicated; they would stay out
there all night.
MR. GENTRY: How have you seen the relationship between Fed and State work over
the years?
MR. PARKER: Well, years ago, and I have been out of it for ten years now, and I have
been out of the Pittman-Robinson program for twenty years, or more.
MR. GENTRY: In your time, how did it work?
MR. PARKER: In my time; first of all the Fish and Wildlife Service used to recruit these
guys out of the States. That was the way that the Pittman-Robinson program was run,
years ago. Back in the 1940s, and 1950s, the old days. You recruited State guys to come
and work for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Federal Aide. Therefore you had a cadre of
State people that knew what they were doing. They started working with the Feds and
they took over the Pittman-Robinson program. These guys really knew what they were
doing! That has shifted now. The salaries are one thing. The State salaries are now more
comparable to the Federal salaries. Therefore these guys don’t feel like they have to leave
their State jobs to go and work for the Feds. That has been a change, and again, I am
shooting from the hip now, so forgive me; but unfortunately the people just don’t have
the experience. Now, I sound like an old-timer that is wore out but I really feel that the
Service has been drained of a lot of its talent over the years through retirements. The
people coming on out of school really haven’t had the opportunity to get the hands on
experience that these guys had in the “old” days. And again, I don’t mean to shoot from
the hip.
13
MR. GENTRY: You are not the first person that I have heard that from. People who are
the best and brightest in the Service today, some will say that same thing; That there are a
lot of the jobs that need to be done that people learn from living in the country, driving
tractors and that kind of thing.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. That’s a good point. And one that I didn’t bring up was
that the pool of people that they used to draw from, these guys out of World War II, like
I said, these people came from rural backgrounds. They knew more about dealing with
rural people. I could see that problem in my latter years in the Fish and Wildlife Service.
People were coming into the Service that had lived in a city all of their lives, and they
went to wildlife school or forestry school. I am not knocking the people; it’s just that
they didn’t have the opportunity to get the knowledge that they needed to work with the
local people on site with wildlife. I am sure that the Forest Service has the same problem.
I have heard that they are in the same situation. Of course they are drawing now,
primarily from an urban situation. The population is practically all urban now!
MR. GENTRY: Well, we won’t beat that one to death.
MR. PARKER: No! And I don’t mean to either. There’s a lot of good people.
MR. GENTRY: In other interviews, I have heard that that is a factor. You know,
whenever a new person comes on and maybe you have to spend a lot of time. One of the
Refuge Managers says, “I have to spend a lot of time teaching a very bright biologist how
to run a chainsaw”!
MR. PARKER: Or, how to drive a tractor!
MR. GENTRY: Those are basic skills that most of the former people came from because
that was the way they were raised.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. And when you talk about cover crops, or mowing, it’s a
terminology or nomenclature that you have to learn. And you have to learn it on the job.
MR. GENTRY: So we will just have to train them!
MR. PARKER: That’s right!
MR. GENTRY: That’s why we have NCTC there!
MR. PARKER: That’s right! [Both laughing]
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MR. GENTRY: If you were going to talk to Mark Madison, he’s going to be listening to
all of this. He’s our Historian. What kind of message would you leave with this new
breed of Fish and Wildlife Service people?
MR. PARKER: Well, in a way, they are probably better than the “old-timers” were.
They have technology on their side now. They’ve got computers, and the ability to keep
information that we kept on yellow legal pads, and sometimes lost. So technology is on
the side of the resources mangers now that we didn’t have before. I can’t even run a
computer, so I am completely lost. The technology is there, but I would urge anybody
coming into the Fish and Wildlife Service to get out in the field, and stay out in the field.
We used to camp for weeks doing fieldwork. Take a tent and camp out on site. That
way you are there, you know more, and you get to learn more about an area. Of course,
back then, a motel was three dollars a night, but our perdiem was only ten dollars a day
and we hated to spend that money. We camped out a lot!
MR. GENTRY: Just out of curiosity, what kind of money did you make when you first
came into the Service?
MR. PARKER: I worked for the State of North Carolina for two years and when I left
North Carolina, I started out making $4,040.00 a year. Of course, all my life I had either
wanted to get into Forestry and/or Wildlife work.
MR. GENTRY: What year was that?
MR. PARKER: That would have been 1960.
MR. GENTRY: That wasn’t bad money then.
MR. PARKER: Oh no! We had three kids, and we did fine.
MR. GENTRY: So the pay wasn’t that bad.
MR. PARKER: Oh no, I’m not trying to say that we were poor people! We weren’t,
we got along fine. But we weren’t going to get rich doing it. I thought that anybody
making $12,000.00 a year was a rich person. As I said, motels were three or four dollars a
night, and in the field, we knew where every one of them was. Sometimes we could fine
one that was two dollars a night. We were cheap. And I am talking about nothing but a
bed, and no TV. Sometimes the bed wasn’t even level but you just accepted that.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever meet some of the so-called Conservation Heroes, like
Rachel Carson?
15
MR. PARKER: I never met her. I knew Lynn Greenwalt, and people like that. Rachel
Carson was active when I was working, that was in the 1960s. But I never met her.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever hear anything about her?
MR. PARKER: Oh yes. Absolutely. I thought that she was on the right track. I
thought that she was somebody who knew what she was talking about.
MR. GENTRY: Tell us what you mean when you say that you thought she was “on the
right track”.
MR. PARKER: With the whole concept of our environment and our ruining of our
environment, this gets into a tough subject. Al Gore is talking about that today, right now
probably, somewhere. Unfortunately, man’s population is growing and our demands and
our needs are growing disproportionately to the rest of the world. We make up a very
small part of the world’s population, but we consume maybe thirty percent of the
world’s resources, in this country. I think that we have lost our ethics as far as natural
resources go. We are loosing to big business and to a whole lot of other factors. We are
putting a lot of valuable property under asphalt. And it is going to require better and
sharper Managers to take care of a dwindling resource out there. This is not something
new. But yes, Rachel Carson was ahead of her time as far as what was happening to our
natural resources and our environment. But you know, back at that time, I don’t think
that anybody appreciated it. It is easy to look back now, thirty years later and say,
“Boy she hit the nail right on the head”. But at that time it didn’t hit like it does now.
MR. GENTRY: Did it “hit” in the Service?
MR. PARKER: I don’t think so. No. Again, I keep going back to the Endangered
Species Act in 1973, when President Nixon signed this into law. It took the Endangered
Species Act to bring people out of their holes, in my opinion. It did for me. I didn’t
know anything about some of these species out here that were in desperate shape; the
Loggerhead Sea Turtles, the Bachman’s Warbler, you can name hundreds and hundreds of
species that nobody knew anything about, or cared about! The Red Wolf was one of
them. And all of a sudden The Act made them prominent species. I think that if it hadn’t
have been for the Endangered Species Act, the Service would still be, well, it would be a
lot further than it was, but it wouldn’t be as far as it is, as far as our perspective on
ecosystem or resource management. The Endangered Species Act was a trigger, and to me
it will always be the trigger that started this whole process. Again, when you looked at
the Service for cadre to work in the endangered animal field, there were few, or nobody
there. Our whole training and perspective was on game management, waterfowl or
whatever. Refuge Managers’ only perspective was on waterfowl management. Again, I
think that the people in the Fish and Wildlife Service are, and have been great people. I
16
feel like I was very fortunate, just extremely fortunate, to work for the Fish and Wildlife
Service, and to get to meet and work with the people there.
MR. GENTRY: Well, we’ll end this by just asking if you would still recommend it to a
young biologist?
MR. PARKER: Absolutely! Again, I regret now, that I retired when I did. Although I
had planned to retire, I wish that I had worked another three or four years.
MR. GENTRY: You’d be working right now wouldn’t you?
MR. PARKER: Oh, I’d love to. Boy, I’d love to!
MR. GENTRY: I appreciate your time in granting this interview.

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1
INTERVIEW WITH WARREN PARKER
BY GEORGE GENTRY NOVEMBER 2, 2000
MR. PARKER: My name is Warren T. Parker. I served with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service for thirty-two years. I came to Ashville, North Carolina in 1977 as the
Endangered Species Coordinator in the old area office, back when we had area offices.
The area offices folded up in the early 1980s. We moved through another reorganization
and I was left as the Field Supervisor of an Endangered Species Field Office in Ashville. I
recruited personnel for the office and I served as Field Supervisor from roughly 1981
through late 1984. I then became the Red Wolf Coordinator for the U. S. Fish and
Wildlife Service. As the Red Wolf Coordinator I actually inherited a lot of work from
Curtis Carley who had been the Fish and Wildlife Service Red Wolf Specialist for many
years, but in Region 2. Since Region 4 suddenly became directly involved in the Red Wolf
Recovery program Region 4 insisted that he bow out of the project, or else move to
Region 4, which he wouldn’t do. I became the Red Wolf Coordinator. If I am not
mistaken, the Red Wolf Coordinator may have been one of the first Endangered Species
Coordinators.
MR. GENTRY: It was the first. So you were actually the second person to take over
the recovery of that endangered species.
MR. PARKER: The recovery, that’s correct. One of the first things that I did was to
appoint a Recovery Team. My knowledge of Wolves was sparse. The reason for my
being appointed as the Endangered Species Coordinator was because of the location of the
reintroduction sites. I had worked for two years with Curt Carley at Land Between the
Lakes over in western Tennessee and Kentucky on a proposed reintroduction project in
conjunction with TVA. Because as Field Supervisor, my responsibility included
Kentucky and Tennessee, North and South Carolina and all endangered species activities
in those four states. I was almost mandated to become directly involved in that project of
the national significance of the reintroduction of an “extinct in the wild” species. I spent a
great deal of time in the Land Between the Lakes area for two years with Curt on that
project. The main failure of that project was that we did not have an experimental
nonessential designation for endangered animals at that time. It was being proposed at
that time, but we did not have anything officially on the books in 1982-83. There was
nothing there to give us the legal authority to reintroduce an endangered animal that was
not fully protected by the Endangered Species Act. The local people over there and the
deer hunters were afraid that the Wolves were going to kill all of the deer and then
possibly even shut down deer hunting in the Lake Between the Lakes area. Then the
environmentalists thought that we were not going to provide them enough protection.
The project started failing and we saw that it wasn’t going to make it. We held five or six
public meetings and they enlisted a tremendous amount of local interest. There was a lot
of opposition and a lot of support. But the reality of the project was unless you had
good public support you were really kind of spinning your wheels.
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MR. GENTRY: Was that a lesson that you think that your group took to heart?
MR. PARKER: Absolutely.
MR. GENTRY: What then was the thing that you learned from the Land Between the
Lakes experience?
MR. PARKER: You have to be honest with the local people. You can’t pull the wool
over them and be a politician. You have to tell them straight up in the best of your
opinion and to the best of your knowledge what is going to happen. And you can’t pull
any punches. You’ve got to gain the confidence of the local people. That is a hard task;
to walk into an area where a predatory animal has been gone for a hundred years and say
“we want to put these animals back where they were”. And then try to explain why this
is in their best interest.
MR. GENTRY: They don’t always see it that way.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. They really don’t understand that. Another key problem,
the one that I failed to anticipate was the fact that the Land Between the Lakes National
Recreation Area was designated when Johnson was President. Through condemnation,
lands were taken from local people. There was a great deal of animosity towards TVA
over there. All of a sudden the Fish and Wildlife Service and TVA were in bed together.
A lot of local people who had lost properties to the Federal government for the National
Recreation Area came to the public meetings and blasted the Fish and Wildlife Service
along with TVA. It gave them a podium to blast the project as well as the whole idea of
the Federal government being involved in that area. This really hurt the whole project.
MR. GENTRY: Did you start the St. Vincent’s Island project?
MR. PARKER: Yes.
MR. GENTRY: Tell me about that. What was the purpose there?
MR. PARKER: One of the problems in dealing with the Red Wolf was that we had a
captive breeding project out at Graham, Washington. And there were half a dozen or less
Zoos around the country that had captive animals in pens. These were second and third
and fourth generation captive animals that had never been in the wild. I came up with the
idea of using Fish and Wildlife Service islands in the southeast, and releasing captive
animals on those islands. This would allow them to breed and bring offspring on those
islands, which should theoretically be wild animals, which would be wild stock to utilize
in a reintroduction project. I think this proved to be a very valuable concept. I think that
3
a lot of the success of the Alligator River project has come about because of using animals
that were born in the wild, instead of captive animals that had never been in the wild.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to the public meetings. Was dealing with the public the
most difficult part of the recovery?
MR. PARKER: Oh yes, absolutely. Dealing with the public is the absolute key. If you
can gain the confidence again, and be completely honest and straightforward with the
public, you are miles ahead.
MR. GENTRY: You have had other, vast experiences with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Does that same message or way of operating carry over into all of the other things that we
do?
MR. PARKER: I think it does. In any aspect of recourse management, the public has to
be made aware of what the situation is. And then you try and get them involved in the
project in any way that you can come up with. It is all in the public interest, and in the
interest of the resource to get the public involved at any level you can, at any level you
can either volunteer, or whatever. The main thing up front is to make sure that you tell
them the truth.
MR. GENTRY: From what I have heard of the history of the Service, and the way the
Refuges have been in the past, that was a hard lesson to learn.
MR. PARKER: Really! That is correct.
MR. GENTRY: Can you talk about that, about way back when, and you’re seeing it
change?
MR. PARKER: That’s been true over the years on all of the Federal projects. I worked
on Savannah National Refuge, which was my first job with the Fish and Wildlife Service
back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That problem was even there at Savannah.
Although Savannah provided a lot of income for local hardware stores, and places around
like that but the very fact that a lot of that Federal property had been taken away and
was now in Federal ownership was a problem. It was now up to the Refuge Manager to
permit trapping or public hunting or whatever on the Refuge. I think that this was a sore
spot with the local people. Therefore, you had to go out of your way as a Manager to
make sure that you continued to help the public in their quest for resources as far as fur
harvest or hunting, fishing or whatever it might be, even gathering medicinal plants. If it’s
feasible to let the public participate and be involved on the Refuge, I think that’s a key to
the success of any Refuge effort. I know that it is true in the event of trying to
reintroduce an endangered species that has been gone for many, many years. If you can’t
gain that confidence, then you are going to have a tough time of it.
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MR. GENTRY: How do you feel about the Red Wolf program there? Are you keeping
up with?
MR. PARKER: I keep up with it through Gary Henry. Gary is now retired, so I won’t
have any real source of information. But the project in eastern North Carolina has gone
very well. I would like to go back in a moment and go through some of the historical
facets about the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge project. The project in the
Smokeys, which I initiated in 1989 failed because of several reasons. One was that the
Park really didn’t have the prey base, except in Cave’s Cove where we reintroduced
animals into the area. We had animals leaving the Park and we found that it was difficult
to keep the animals in the Park, primarily because of the prey base. The prey base just
isn’t that good in the Park because it is all old growth. Therefore, the small mammal base
isn’t there for the Wolf to prey on. That project, when I was in charge of the program
was set up as a two-year experiment to see if the project could succeed. But it was also
to see what the interactions between the Coyote, which was then expanding not only into
the Park but also into eastern North Carolina. We wanted to see if it was possible to
reintroduce Wolves into an area where you already have resident Coyotes. That was the
original thesis for the project. It was a two-year project, but then I retired in 1990 and
the project was kept on track for another three or four years. I think that I might have
pulled the plug a little earlier. But nevertheless, a great deal of knowledge and information
was gained from the project in the Smokey Mountain National Park.
The project at Alligator River is relatively secure. I think that there will be Red Wolves in
that area for many, many years. The only thing that I regret is that we didn’t try another
reintroduction site somewhere in the intervening years. Where that would have been, I am
not sure. I probably would have attempted one on the Francis Marion National Forest,
which is near Bull’s Island. We had great public support there in that area north of
Charleston. On the Bull’s Island project, I think the Forest Service would have worked
with us. But again, the problem with the Red Wolf is the expansion of the Coyote into
its former range. With the demise of the Wolf, the Coyote has moved east.
MR. GENTRY: You said you wanted to talk about some historical things in the Red
Wolf project. Let’s go back and go over those.
MR. PARKER: In 1984 the Prudential Insurance Company offered to give the property
that is now known as the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to the Federal
government for a tax write-off. As I understand, going back those many years ago to the
mid 1980s, Prudential was financially strapped and having a difficult time with that
property down there. They were having a difficult time in managing that property in
mainland Dare County for farming. They decided to take the tax write-off and donate the
one hundred and eighty thousand acres or so to the Federal government. The Fish and
Wildlife Service secured the land through that arrangement. Immediately I saw that this
5
land down there, which is a peninsula, might be an ideal site for a Red Wolf reintroduction
because there was water on three sides. It was a fairly sizeable piece of property with
adjacent properties that might be made available for expansion onto private lands. The
new Refuge Manager down there was John Taylor. He and I became close friends. John
came down from Alaska where he had initiated a new Wildlife Refuge. He was very much
interested in Wolves. John became my right hand man; he and I really worked together
for about a year trying to secure the interest and support of local people in the Dare
County area and in surrounding areas. We wound up hosting four public meetings down
there and after a year of working with the people there, we ended up getting about eighty
or ninety percent support from the local people. I thought that this was extraordinary.
The Red Wolf had been gone from eastern North Carolina for about two hundred years.
So this was novel, and it was really different. But I think that the public realized the
plight of the Red Wolf and I give those people a lot of credit, I’ll have to say; they were
really willing to work with us and that made it more important to John and I to give them
the straight facts as we knew them. There were some things that we told those people
that didn’t turn out the way that we thought they would. One of the major ones that I
still have nightmares about was the recapture collar. Dave Meach and I had worked
together some in northern Minnesota in an effort to learn about Wolves and capture
techniques. Dave is the acknowledged Wolf specialist in the world probably. Dave and I
became good friends. Dave was interested in developing a recapture collar, which was a
collar that you fitted around the neck of an animal. You could, through darts implanted in
the collar, tranquilize the animal by remote radio signal. You could then go and pick the
animal up. This was a tremendous reintroduction ploy. The local public thought that
this sounded great. If you can put collar on these animals and “If they end up in my back
yard you can knock then down and go pick them up”. It was great PR. Dave and I went
to 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, and some how or another those people decided that this
idea had some merit. They agreed to develop the recapture collar for us. After the
support of the local people, and including this concept of the recapture collar to which I
attribute gaining their support, the animals actually got to the Alligator National Wildlife
Refuge, and we put the animals out in the wild after acclimation, we found that the
recapture collars were failing. They were not working. Some of the collars worked, and
some didn’t. There were a lot of gold connections in the collar technology, as I
understand it. The salt-water environment down there in mainland Dare County was just
too harsh. It caused corrosion in some of the internal components.
MR. GENTRY: So they failed. And to the locals, you were a liar probably.
MR. PARKER: That is right. However, we talked to a lot of people. We started to hold
a public meeting and explain the problem but we talked to some local people and they
kind of understood. Again, that was three or four months into the project, and given that
three or four month period of time, the Wolves had not created a problem with anybody.
I think that kind of took the edge off of the potential for public problems. There was a
chicken lost every now and then. There were some other problems that came up but
6
these were mainly law enforcement type problems. One of the things that I told the
people was that under this experimental, nonessential designation of these animals; if a
hunter for example, happened to shot a deer and the bullet went through the deer and
killed a Wolf we wouldn’t prosecute. This was a hypothetical example that I gave them.
And of course there was no intent involved. Then we had a case down there in which one
of the gentlemen that I had talked to, and who was supporting the project; he was a
trapper on the Refuge, caught a Red Wolf in one of his sets and the Wolf drowned. His
intent, I am sure was not to catch a Red Wolf, but the way that he had set his traps had
violated State Fish and Game Commission law. Our law enforcement people decided that
they wanted to get involved too and that became an issue and a little bit of a problem.
From the biological perspective, and I can only speak from that end of it since I am not a
Law Enforcement Agent, we did everything that we could to isolate the public from any
actual involvement in killing a Wolf. A Wolf hit by a car at night is something that we
would not prosecute. That was the attitude that we took. And that attitude held good
the whole time that I was involved in the project, and I think that continues today. There
has been some “blips” here and there with the project; local landowners shoot one,
thinking that it is a Coyote, and all of a sudden they are being prosecuted by the Federal
government. That’s happened, and it has caused some real hard feelings. But by and
large the idea that John Taylor and I presented to the people down there; we maintained
that continuity of thought and intent. There was never any intent to do anything except
for what we did. But I am getting ahead of myself; after five years, we did go back and
hold public meetings down there. After the Wolves were released, there was a five-year
interim. We evaluated the project and went back and held public meetings and the public
was, by and large, was still ninety percent in favor of the project because there had been
no interactions or problems. Nobody had been attacked by a Wolf. Again, I think that
the project was successful. The only problem down there now is the potential for inter-breeding
with Coyotes.
MR. GENTRY: That is still a problem?
MR. PARKER: It is still a problem, and will probably always be a peripheral problem.
The concept, as Curt Carley explained to me, and I accepted, is that you can maintain a
core base of pure Red Wolves, but on the perimeter you are going to have some inter-breeding.
Which now, they are finding is true even up in Canada with the Grey Wolves in
Ontario and in northern Minnesota. Those animals’ genetic makeup has been tainted by
Coyote genetics. If you talk about pure Grey Wolves, you have to be careful about
where you are talking about.
MR. GENTRY: Pure anything!
MR. PARKER: That’s right! [Laughing]
7
MR. GENTRY: The life expectancy of any Endangered Species Coordinator is pretty
precarious isn’t it?
MR. PARKER: Oh yeah! Well, I was fortunate, because I had timed my retirement well.
I had planned my retirement, and when I hit thirty-two years, I decided to retire. In a
way, I am glad that I did, and in a way, I wish I had stayed another two or three years. I
really enjoyed it. I thought that that was one of the best jobs in the Fish and Wildlife
Service. The Park Superintendent in the Great Smokeys, and I’m not trying to blow my
own horn, but he really hated to see me retire. But Gary Henry, who I had hired, was
with the Forest Service and he came down and worked with me and I wanted Gary to take
my place because I trusted him. I knew that he was a top biologist and I knew that he
could handle the job easily, and he did. Gary did a fine job with it. But yes, a
Coordinators job is one where if you are successful, you have worked yourself out of a
job.
MR. GENTRY: And if you’re not?
MR. PARKER: And if you’re not [successful] you’re in the frying pan with the Fish
and Wildlife Service! I still think that the Coordinators have sort of fallen by the
wayside. They don’t seem to be the key that they used to be. The Coordinator, to me, is
the guy that the Fish and Wildlife Service should depend on. You don’t give a job to a
Coordinator unless he’s the guy that’s going to do the job. Then you turn loose, you
don’t put constraints on him, and you let him go. Let him run his budget, and he gets the
job done. Fortunately for me, my Supervisor was in Atlanta, in the Regional office there.
And he gave me carte blanche and let me do what I wanted to do and what I had to do. In
my opinion, that’s the way that the Coordinator job can be best handled. Trust the guy,
pay him the salary and let him loose, and he’ll do the job. I have every confidence in the
Fish and Wildlife Services professional staff.
MR. GENTRY: We were talking about some of the public problems with the Red Wolf
and other endangered species; what about biological problems that you had with the Red
Wolf?
MR. PARKER: There were biological problems. I am sure that Curt Carley has told you
about these. The remnant animals that we had to deal with were numbered in the
fourteen, fifteen, sixteen realm. That was the genetic pool from which we had to work
which was always a concern. There was always a fear of inter-breeding, genetic
bottlenecks, so that was always in back of our minds. In the project out at Graham,
Washington, Sue Burns took care of the Wolves. Sue was very careful in separating these
animals, genetically, as far as she could. The gene pool to start with was very small, but
you try to expand that as much as you can, and that was a problem. Looking back at the
Land Between the Lakes and the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge projects,
actually the Wolves themselves were not difficult to deal with biologically. It was easy to
8
trap a Wolf, but it is hard to catch a Coyote. Mike Phillips came down; John Taylor and
I hired Mike Phillips. Mike was in Alaska at the time and he came down and took over
the Field Project at Alligator River. Mike did a splendid job. And that was a day and
nighttime job. You had to be all the time, and he did a great job. But again, the Wolves
were not that hard to deal with. If you had to catch a rogue Wolf, he wasn’t all that hard
to catch. But now the Coyote moving in has proven to be another problem. They are
much more difficult to capture and control. On the periphery of the core population of
Wolves, there is inter-breeding going on. That is one thing that we found out. The
problem with the Red Wolf of course is having big enough areas in which to reintroduce
these animals. I am afraid the clock is just moving against the Red Wolf as far as having
other areas in which to reintroduce them. I mentioned other reintroduction areas, but
today there are probably no other areas in the southeast to release the Red Wolf because
there are Coyote populations established everywhere. One of the things that I was
concerned about with the Mexican Wolf project out in Arizona, was the fact that the
Mexican Wolf had been gone from the lower forty-eight for many years. There were still
a few animals left in old Mexico, but in the interim the Coyote population had filled that
void where the Wolves were at one time. I feel that they are going to be phased in with
their reintroduction program, with the same problem of putting animals back into a sea of
Coyotes and hoping that they can maintain themselves genetically.
MR. GENTRY: Is there anything else about Red Wolves that we need to hit on before I
ask you just some general questions about the Service?
MR. PARKER: As I look back over the Red Wolf projects, back into the 1970s; I
remember when I first went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, one of my first jobs
was in Texas and Oklahoma on the Red River over there. I would meet State and Federal
Animal Control Specialists who were trapping what now I know were Red Wolves,
because of the predator-livestock problems. I have often wondered, and I wish that I had
had the foresight to get involved with those trappers who were catching these animals.
First of all, I wish that I had kept the animals, pelts and everything, because they just
destroyed them. I would like to have found out, really, how much livestock damage was
going on, or was this just something that was kept in place, and kept going on and on. It
had become a perpetual motion machine almost, of trapping predators.
MR. GENTRY: So you saw a time when the Federal government was either at the same
time, or making a transition of killing the Red Wolf?
MR. PARKER: Oh yeah, in north Texas in the Sulfur River Bottoms, and in the northern
Red River area there was active participation by the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as
the States of Oklahoma and Texas in trapping these animals.
MR. GENTRY: And at the same time you were working for them?
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MR. PARKER: No, this was back in the early 1960s.
MR. GENTRY: So, not then years after that, you were trying to save them?
MR. PARKER: That’s correct. I worked in Vicksburg, Mississippi for a few years and I
remember a Canadian biologist, he was Dave Meacher’s mentor, and I can’t remember his
name, but he was down south of Vicksburg on one of the islands in the river, trapping
Wolves, and they were Red Wolves. He was trying to document the status of the Red
Wolf. And this was a Canadian biologist now, who is now dead. But he was one of Dave
Meacher’s mentors. I wish I could come up with his name. I do remember that; there
was active interest in the Red Wolf, even at that time. All of that was coming to a head
when Curt Carley got involved with the demise of the Red Wolf, and the Fish and
Wildlife Service was involved in the demise! So, what comes around goes around! A few
years later we are pumping Fish and Wildlife Service money into trying to get the Wolf
back into the wild. It is kind of an interesting scenario if you get to thinking about it.
MR. GENTRY: We hopefully learn from our mistakes.
MR. PARKER: That was in the old days. Predators were looked on with great disfavor.
Cougars and Wolves and Eagles, anything that preyed on game animals was looked on
with great disfavor.
MR. GENTRY: I take it that you are saying that it wasn’t necessarily the “good old
days”?
MR. PARKER: That’s right! People think about it, but it wasn’t! Our biology was
really skewed.
MR. GENTRY: How much progress do you think that we have made?
MR. PARKER: Oh, enormous progress. The Endangered Species Act was the greatest
piece of wildlife legislation ever signed into law. It changed the Fish and Wildlife Service
from a bunch of waterfowl biologists essentially, or game biologists, into real biologists,
with a full perspective of what’s going on out there. Because when the law was signed in,
in 1973 there was not a cadre of people in the Fish and Wildlife Service to take over this
magnificent piece of legislation, nobody. I remember that Keith Schriner was the first to
be in charge of the Endangered Species program in Washington. He had to go out to the
Universities to recruit people who were specialists. Nobody hardly in the Fish and
Wildlife Service was knowledgeable about endangered species.
MR. GENTY: I guess you must have left the Service just before the Ecosystem
Management came in. Are you familiar with that?
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MR. PARKER: Basically, yes.
MR. GENTRY: Do you see that as another step in the right direction?
MR. PARKER: Yeah.
MR. GENTRY: Tell me about that.
MR. PARKER: Managing the ecosystem is important. I worked in Vicksburg in what
they used to call River Basins. That was almost an ecosystem concept, but not as
expanded as it is today. We were looking at river basins, the whole river basin. We were
surveying the Red River, and the White River in Arkansas for example. Also the
Hatchaphalia [sic] or whatever river it is, a basin. The Service was sort of forced into it at
the time by the Army Corps of Engineers because they wanted to develop those River
Bottoms, so the Service became involved in a roundabout way. It was not because
somebody had the bright idea that we ought to be doing this, but because of a reaction to
the Army Corps of Engineers and their Water Resource projects. In a miniscule way, we
were involved in an almost ecosystem approach at that time. But non-game was not
considered. It was strictly from a game resource perspective, and a Fisheries resource
perspective that was based on the krill census. So today we have expanded from that into
the whole kit and caboodle. But again, I think that the Endangered Species Act is what
stimulated this whole idea. Over the years a cadre of Fish and Wildlife Service
employees, of which I was one, became involved in the Endangered Species Act and then
our perspective changed. The whole concept of “Game Management” which were taught
in school, changed to “Wildlife Management”, all wildlife. Then of course you get
involved in the ecosystem concept. So it is a natural evolution, but the Endangered
Species Act, in 1973, was the sparkplug that started this whole process, in my opinion.
MR. GENTRY: O.K. What other major changes have you seen in the Service over your
thirty-two year career?
MR. PARKER: The one thing that I talk about with a lot of my cronies, and I don’t
mean to “knock” the Service: let me say first that I love the Fish and Wildlife Service, but
unfortunately people are coming into the Service today who are not hunters and are not
fishermen. Their perspective about hunting and fishing is not what it was before. I am
shooting from the hip now, and I hope that I am wrong. I have a feeling, and a lot of my
state compatriots say the same thing. The Wildlife Commission here in North Carolina is
hiring people that are not hunting or fishing. Therefore, their concept is more protective.
Which I, as an old-schooler have a problem with. I view our resources out there as
renewable resources. Hunting is part of that, legitimately. The Pittman-Robinson
Program, which I was involved with for about ten years, has done so much good for
wildlife management in the United States through PR [Pittman-Robinson] and “DJ”
monies to the States. Really, a lot of the land that was purchased with PR monies not
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only was preserving deer and waterfowl and other games species, but enormous amounts
of non-game species at the same time. In a way, the ecosystem approach was being
practiced, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t realize it.
MR. GENTRY: When you, in your earliest days in the Service, maybe before you were
in the Service: as I understand the history of wildlife in the part of the country where I
come from: did you find that there were virtually no deer left?
MR. PARKER: That’s right, the deer were gone.
MR. GENTRY: Give me a little perspective about that, of what change that you have
seen.
MR. PARKER: Well, when I was a youngster, there were no deer in Virginia and
northeastern North Carolina. I went to NC State. There were no deer. There were a few
remnant native, original eastern wild turkeys in the River bottoms. I used to hunt those.
But squirrel hunting was the thing. If you really wanted to be adventurous you went
turkey hunting. But there were no deer. Again, squirrel hunting was the entry for people
that wanted to hunt.
MR. GENTRY: This was because there were no deer.
MR. PARKER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: When did you start to see it change? And how and what made it
change?
MR. PARKER: Again, I have to go back to the Pittman-Robinson program. The monies
that went to the States from the tax on firearms and ammunition generated the World War
II veterans that came out of wildlife schools. I am a Korean War veteran, and I worked
with a lot of these guys. But the World War II guys were the “old” guys to me.
[Laughing] Now I am an old guy! These are the guys that I worked with, and my mentors
were the World War II vets who came back and became Wildlife Managers. With the help
of the Pittman-Robinson program, these guys took the money and started restocking deer.
They were taking deer out of Wisconsin, or wherever they could get deer. That program
became one of the biggest success stories in the Pittman-Robinson program; the
reintroduction of the Whitetail Deer. Again, I go back and think of many of these guys
from World War II. I mean these guys drank, and fought, they would get in fistfights. I
was overawed with these guys all of the time because they were “rough and ready”
people! At night you played poker, all night even if you didn’t want to! It was different
world, back in the 1960s, because that was it. These were all World War II vets and they
were hard lifers. I got sucked in with these guys. I admired them a great deal, but after a
week with them, I was ready to go home! But I will give them the credit!
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MR. GENTRY: It sounds almost like Whitetail Deer was an endangered species without
us ever recognizing it.
MR. PARKER: That’s correct. But the reintroduction of these animals, you see, those
were the reintroductions that started this whole concept of reintroductions. It all started
with bringing the Whitetail Deer back. The Wisconsin deer are still talked about around
here, on the Biltmore estate here in western North Carolina. These were Wisconsin
“blue” deer. They called the blue deer because they are dark colored deer. You still hear
people around here in the mountains say that they have seen a blue deer every now and
then. These are remnants of that genetic pool of Wisconsin animals. I’ll have to say that
the Pittman-Robinson program and the World War II vets who went to Wildlife School
are responsible, in my opinion, for what you see today in the deer population and the
turkey population in the southeast. The Wild Turkey became a prime reintroduction
candidate, and it has been nothing but a big success story. I have helped guys in
Kentucky release turkeys, and I have helped them release deer. One of my treasured
memories of the Pittman-Robinson program was working with those State biologists.
Those guys knew what they were doing. And they were dedicated; they would stay out
there all night.
MR. GENTRY: How have you seen the relationship between Fed and State work over
the years?
MR. PARKER: Well, years ago, and I have been out of it for ten years now, and I have
been out of the Pittman-Robinson program for twenty years, or more.
MR. GENTRY: In your time, how did it work?
MR. PARKER: In my time; first of all the Fish and Wildlife Service used to recruit these
guys out of the States. That was the way that the Pittman-Robinson program was run,
years ago. Back in the 1940s, and 1950s, the old days. You recruited State guys to come
and work for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Federal Aide. Therefore you had a cadre of
State people that knew what they were doing. They started working with the Feds and
they took over the Pittman-Robinson program. These guys really knew what they were
doing! That has shifted now. The salaries are one thing. The State salaries are now more
comparable to the Federal salaries. Therefore these guys don’t feel like they have to leave
their State jobs to go and work for the Feds. That has been a change, and again, I am
shooting from the hip now, so forgive me; but unfortunately the people just don’t have
the experience. Now, I sound like an old-timer that is wore out but I really feel that the
Service has been drained of a lot of its talent over the years through retirements. The
people coming on out of school really haven’t had the opportunity to get the hands on
experience that these guys had in the “old” days. And again, I don’t mean to shoot from
the hip.
13
MR. GENTRY: You are not the first person that I have heard that from. People who are
the best and brightest in the Service today, some will say that same thing; That there are a
lot of the jobs that need to be done that people learn from living in the country, driving
tractors and that kind of thing.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. That’s a good point. And one that I didn’t bring up was
that the pool of people that they used to draw from, these guys out of World War II, like
I said, these people came from rural backgrounds. They knew more about dealing with
rural people. I could see that problem in my latter years in the Fish and Wildlife Service.
People were coming into the Service that had lived in a city all of their lives, and they
went to wildlife school or forestry school. I am not knocking the people; it’s just that
they didn’t have the opportunity to get the knowledge that they needed to work with the
local people on site with wildlife. I am sure that the Forest Service has the same problem.
I have heard that they are in the same situation. Of course they are drawing now,
primarily from an urban situation. The population is practically all urban now!
MR. GENTRY: Well, we won’t beat that one to death.
MR. PARKER: No! And I don’t mean to either. There’s a lot of good people.
MR. GENTRY: In other interviews, I have heard that that is a factor. You know,
whenever a new person comes on and maybe you have to spend a lot of time. One of the
Refuge Managers says, “I have to spend a lot of time teaching a very bright biologist how
to run a chainsaw”!
MR. PARKER: Or, how to drive a tractor!
MR. GENTRY: Those are basic skills that most of the former people came from because
that was the way they were raised.
MR. PARKER: That’s right. And when you talk about cover crops, or mowing, it’s a
terminology or nomenclature that you have to learn. And you have to learn it on the job.
MR. GENTRY: So we will just have to train them!
MR. PARKER: That’s right!
MR. GENTRY: That’s why we have NCTC there!
MR. PARKER: That’s right! [Both laughing]
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MR. GENTRY: If you were going to talk to Mark Madison, he’s going to be listening to
all of this. He’s our Historian. What kind of message would you leave with this new
breed of Fish and Wildlife Service people?
MR. PARKER: Well, in a way, they are probably better than the “old-timers” were.
They have technology on their side now. They’ve got computers, and the ability to keep
information that we kept on yellow legal pads, and sometimes lost. So technology is on
the side of the resources mangers now that we didn’t have before. I can’t even run a
computer, so I am completely lost. The technology is there, but I would urge anybody
coming into the Fish and Wildlife Service to get out in the field, and stay out in the field.
We used to camp for weeks doing fieldwork. Take a tent and camp out on site. That
way you are there, you know more, and you get to learn more about an area. Of course,
back then, a motel was three dollars a night, but our perdiem was only ten dollars a day
and we hated to spend that money. We camped out a lot!
MR. GENTRY: Just out of curiosity, what kind of money did you make when you first
came into the Service?
MR. PARKER: I worked for the State of North Carolina for two years and when I left
North Carolina, I started out making $4,040.00 a year. Of course, all my life I had either
wanted to get into Forestry and/or Wildlife work.
MR. GENTRY: What year was that?
MR. PARKER: That would have been 1960.
MR. GENTRY: That wasn’t bad money then.
MR. PARKER: Oh no! We had three kids, and we did fine.
MR. GENTRY: So the pay wasn’t that bad.
MR. PARKER: Oh no, I’m not trying to say that we were poor people! We weren’t,
we got along fine. But we weren’t going to get rich doing it. I thought that anybody
making $12,000.00 a year was a rich person. As I said, motels were three or four dollars a
night, and in the field, we knew where every one of them was. Sometimes we could fine
one that was two dollars a night. We were cheap. And I am talking about nothing but a
bed, and no TV. Sometimes the bed wasn’t even level but you just accepted that.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever meet some of the so-called Conservation Heroes, like
Rachel Carson?
15
MR. PARKER: I never met her. I knew Lynn Greenwalt, and people like that. Rachel
Carson was active when I was working, that was in the 1960s. But I never met her.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever hear anything about her?
MR. PARKER: Oh yes. Absolutely. I thought that she was on the right track. I
thought that she was somebody who knew what she was talking about.
MR. GENTRY: Tell us what you mean when you say that you thought she was “on the
right track”.
MR. PARKER: With the whole concept of our environment and our ruining of our
environment, this gets into a tough subject. Al Gore is talking about that today, right now
probably, somewhere. Unfortunately, man’s population is growing and our demands and
our needs are growing disproportionately to the rest of the world. We make up a very
small part of the world’s population, but we consume maybe thirty percent of the
world’s resources, in this country. I think that we have lost our ethics as far as natural
resources go. We are loosing to big business and to a whole lot of other factors. We are
putting a lot of valuable property under asphalt. And it is going to require better and
sharper Managers to take care of a dwindling resource out there. This is not something
new. But yes, Rachel Carson was ahead of her time as far as what was happening to our
natural resources and our environment. But you know, back at that time, I don’t think
that anybody appreciated it. It is easy to look back now, thirty years later and say,
“Boy she hit the nail right on the head”. But at that time it didn’t hit like it does now.
MR. GENTRY: Did it “hit” in the Service?
MR. PARKER: I don’t think so. No. Again, I keep going back to the Endangered
Species Act in 1973, when President Nixon signed this into law. It took the Endangered
Species Act to bring people out of their holes, in my opinion. It did for me. I didn’t
know anything about some of these species out here that were in desperate shape; the
Loggerhead Sea Turtles, the Bachman’s Warbler, you can name hundreds and hundreds of
species that nobody knew anything about, or cared about! The Red Wolf was one of
them. And all of a sudden The Act made them prominent species. I think that if it hadn’t
have been for the Endangered Species Act, the Service would still be, well, it would be a
lot further than it was, but it wouldn’t be as far as it is, as far as our perspective on
ecosystem or resource management. The Endangered Species Act was a trigger, and to me
it will always be the trigger that started this whole process. Again, when you looked at
the Service for cadre to work in the endangered animal field, there were few, or nobody
there. Our whole training and perspective was on game management, waterfowl or
whatever. Refuge Managers’ only perspective was on waterfowl management. Again, I
think that the people in the Fish and Wildlife Service are, and have been great people. I
16
feel like I was very fortunate, just extremely fortunate, to work for the Fish and Wildlife
Service, and to get to meet and work with the people there.
MR. GENTRY: Well, we’ll end this by just asking if you would still recommend it to a
young biologist?
MR. PARKER: Absolutely! Again, I regret now, that I retired when I did. Although I
had planned to retire, I wish that I had worked another three or four years.
MR. GENTRY: You’d be working right now wouldn’t you?
MR. PARKER: Oh, I’d love to. Boy, I’d love to!
MR. GENTRY: I appreciate your time in granting this interview.